Musings Meditations

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 16, 15 April 1908, Page 5

Musings Meditations

By

Dog Toby

A LITTLE PAGAN.

IT was Sunday afternoon in London, a time when the average Briton feels in a righteous and somnolent mood. I had been to St. Paul’s in the morning and had heard some magnificent music and scraps of a very orthodox but very dry sermon. I was staying with friends in Chargesstreet, and they told me I would have heard a much better sermon nearer home at St. James’s, as some preacher from one of the colonial dioceses was acting as locum tenens, and delivering a series of highly interesting but slightly unconventional sermons on the real meaning of religion. In the evening I went to hear him preach from the pulpit so long associated with the names of famous men. I thought of Stopford Brooke’s inimitable discourses on the theology of the English poets, of Farrar’s eloquent biographical sketches, of Liddon's famous lenten lectures, and I wondered if this new man was going to rival their fame and add yet further lustre to this celebrated church. He was certainly unconventional. He took as his text: “These people which know not the law are accursed.” He dwelt on the arrogance of many professed teachers of religion, on their assumption that they alone possessed the truth, and on thoir tendency to make all religion consist in knowledge, creed and dogma. He reminded us that the disciples were taught by a little child being placed in their midst, and he said that we all might learn more from the simple honest childlike souls around us than from scholastic theology or dusty monastic tomes of mediaeval divinity. Our book knowledge must be corrected and verified by our knowledge of the book of life. It was a strange discourse, in great contrast to the morning sermon which had emphasised the need of correct thought on the subject of apostolical succession, and I felt quite sure that the preacher was thinking of some personal experience of his own. I was anxious to meet him, so my friends promised to try and get him to dine with us during the week. Fortunately he was able to accept, and I found him a most entertaining talker, full of anecdote and with a keen sense of humour. 1 drew him on to tala of his work in the colony, and asked if colonial experience had at all modified his views on church matters.

“Very much so,” he replied, “and I hope. I am both a wiser and a better man for it. I must tell you that from a boy I was brought up for the Church. I went to a large school, and from there to Oxford, where I found myself in the midst of a cultured and influential ecclesiastical coterie. At Cuddesdon the atmosphere was entirely theological, as of course you know, and when 1 was finally ordained 1 had a deep-rooted conviction that the Catholic Church and the Catholic creed alone represented salvation. If I did not believe altogether in the literal inspiration of the Bible, I did believe very thoroughly in the literal inspiration of the Prayer Book, more especially the rubrics. And then 1 was asked if I would go as a Home Missionary to New Zealand. I felt it was my duty to go, and I thought I would teach some of the out back settlers the meaning of advanced Anglican theology, and show them the error of their ways, as I had heard that some of them were not very definite churchmen, and many hardly understood the teaching to l>e gained from an advanced ritual. I remember well the first settlement where I was to hold service. I was horrified to find that there was no proper church, only a schoolroom that was

used by every denomination in turn. The people, too, had only the haziest idea of a Church of England service, as they ha<l not had one for several years. I stayed with one of the settlers, and I was surprised at the hospitable way in which they welcomed me, and the pleasure they showed at my visit. I found, also, that they were willing to do all in their power to help me, and they assured me that a good ninny poo-

pie were coming in from distant parts of the settlement to attend the service. They all seemed to be decent, honest, hardworking folk, though, as 1 thought, somewhat indifferent to church teaching. I found myself, to my own astonishment, beginning to admire them, and to wonder whether, after all, they might not have quite as much of the real spirit of religion as many people who made a greater profession of their creed. They used Moody and Sankey's hymns, and 1 actually joined with fervour Ca what 1 had always hitherto regarded as ranting doggerel, and I neglected some of my most cherished rubrics and ritual in order to try and make the service intelligible. My host had a charming lad of about fourteen, who had attached himself to me from the first. He had promised to hunt up a lot of chaps, as he phrased it, for my show. He had hoped they would all give a bit, as it was a long way to come for only a bob or two. 1 tried to put things in a higher light, but he persisted in regarding me as someone who had come to give soino sort of a performance, and send round the hat afterwards. Still he brought, a lot of other lads with him to the service, and I was grateful for his well-meant if sometimes disconcerting attempts to keep them in order. On Monday morning he said he would take me for a walk, so we strolled down towards the railway line. I tried to find out what he knew of the Bible history and the prayer beak, and I was astonished at his ignorance. I told him he was a little pagan. “What’s a pagan, guvnor?” he asked. “Why,” 1 explained, “a little heathen. A person who does not know anyuwng about religion or right or wrong.” “I tries to do right,” he said, “but you see we chaps brought up in the wilds never has nobody to teach us. You’ve been brought up different.” I lazily watched the smoke of an advancing train, and then my eyes wandered to the line just below us. To my horror I saw a little mite scarcely two years old playing near the metals right in the path of the engine. “Look,” I said to the boy, but he had already seen the danger, and was racing down the hill. 1 seemed powerless myself, I could only gaze in horror at the oncoming express. Then I saw the lad dart right in front of the train and catch the child, and I found when I reached the line that the baby was safe, but that the boy was lying crushed to death beside it. He was just breathing, and I bent my head to catch his words. “Guv’nor,” he said, “I may be a little pagan; but. I couldn't see the kiddie killed.”